I really enjoyed the showreel below by Leticia Reinaldo, focussing on modelling, lighting and texturing. The timing is what caught my attention, there is enough time to view the models yet they aren’t overstaying their welcome…

Game development is an active art form, as the player has the ability to influence the path and the destiny of their character.

A short history of Games:

-1950’s: pre video games, including boardgames, sports…

-70’s: early arcade games were introduced… space invaders/pong/asteroids.

-80’s: dawn of the mass produced video games… these years saw the rise and fall of the Indie game developer. Games including Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda and Super Mario brothers along with Alexey Pajitnov’s, Tetris, are present on the top 10 best feeling games of the 80’s.

-90’s: Saw the beginning and rise of the 3D graphical game. Doom (1993) and quake (1996)

2000’s: Larger, more complex games were being created, online multiplayer games also saw a rise in players. World of warcraft (2004) X box and Playstation 2 were released onto the market, the playstation coming out on top as the best selling console, however Microsoft were only just appearing onto the market as Sega started to disappear.

2010+: The Inide game developer was re-emerging back onto the market. Mobile gaming became more popular and new technologies were being released, Oculus Rift and more recently the Xbox one and Playstation 4.

Game Design, theory and practice: This link contains an excerpt from Richard Rouse III’s book entitled, ‘Game design- Theory and Practice: The elements of Gameplay.

Peter Chan: http://peterchanconceptart.com Working for companies (mainly as a concept artist) such as EA, Double Fine and Lucas Art Entertainment, but also working on films as concept artist/ illustrator: films including Monsters University, A series of Unfortunate Events, Box Trolls and many more. His work has an interesting ‘sketchy’ style to it which when combined with his slightly forced perspective makes it interesting to look at.

Before I start into the assets that have been created, we did make a slight change in our scenario that will cause the collisions, it would no longer be in first person perspective, there will no gun in the lower part of the frame as it is no longer needed. A car was modelled and also rigged so this gave us the ability to use the car as the object that will cause the destruction to start. The car also gives us the opportunity to experiment with a few different scenarios, such as:

The car travelling along a piece of road, skidding out of control and hitting a fence/wall that will then cause the telephone wires to snap and spark. We could have the car crash into the house causing an explosion which everything else in the scene would have to react to. (We did consider putting the penguin into the driver’s seat and having the character as a drunk driver with the zombie walking out into the middle of the road causing the penguin to have to swerve to avoid him… but it’s still undecided…)

So really the car gives us more options as to how we want to approach this scenario, plus a team member actually rigged it so the wheels would rotate when moved so why would we just let it sit there in the set!

Before I started modelling anything in maya, I looked for some visuals already existing of the objects deciding first that metal/ oil barrels would be better suited to our style than wooden ones..

Some references from Call of Duty…

A quick sketch before starting to modelling the barrels, the undamaged barrel seemed to look a little too ‘perfect’ so I’ll also attempt some dented/damaged ones too…

My models, based off of the references and drawings…

The one below was created to be set alight…

Firstly I watched a tutorial on creating fire in maya and then applied this to my barrel:

We can then have it burn for as long as we want (base resolution is currently only 60 but we can increase that later…)

A few rendered images:

Telephone/electricity poles…

Again I started by finding some reference images:

Then a quick sketch of my own:

and the models, in the end we only used one of them:

The poles were connected by a cylinder, which would act as the wires:

To the wires an ncloth was applied and then connected to the poles using a nconstraint transform at specific points, the poles were then changed to rigid bodies to prevent the wires falling through them when a gravity field was applied… the gravity field allowed for the wires to become slack:

allowing them to bounce around:

Seeing as they were going to be destroyed in some way, I experimented with adding sparks to the scene by having a wire pushed upwards, ripping it away from where it was being held by the poles.

This was achieved by having a hidden object (another ncloth) pulled upwards through the wire by a gravity field of it’s own, it does appear for a briefly in the video above, causing it to be ripped from the rigid bodied poles. Then where I had earlier applied nconstraints between the poles and the wire I placed emitters and animated the rate of the particles to increase form 0 as the wires start to move, this eventually increases to 300. The particle render type changed to streak and then adjusted the tail size to control the size of the streaks. The particles start off red and then as they age change to yellow.

Some rendered images:

I also modelled a wall that can be incorporated into the scene if we need it, maybe have some things crash into in…

Some smoke for the sense was also created following a tutorial in an issue of 3D artist that can then be added anywhere that needs it…